Concept

For Lucid Lynx , the technical goal of Impression and Night Impression is to bring both themes to a common code base. The differences between the two themes is visible in the background color of the menu panels, the color of the scroll bars, and the adoption of the Humanity icon theme for Impression and the Humanity-Dark icon theme for Night Impression.

The desire is to offer two themes from the Ubuntu community to stand side-by-side with the professionally developed Human theme from Canonical.

The objective is to enhance the user computing experience by applying balance and harmony to the Gnome Desktop framing applications in such a manner as to permit the eye to focus without distraction on the content displayed.

As many users express a desire to use a theme framed in dark borders and titles as evidenced by the number of "dark" themes submitted to sites such as Ubuntu Art and Gnome Art, the pallets of Impression and Night Impression are as dark as practical.

The author assumes many Gnome applications were designed anticipating the desktop would be brushed in lighter colors and these solutions may not present well against a dark canvas. Key subject areas from the standard Ubuntu installation provided guidance in creating the final solution. For the most part desktop and embedded application icons were the metric for determining panel colors. The author concedes dark icons display poorly against a dark background.

Once the base color was discovered the task became adding additional complimentary colors. The "toolbar" provides a styling opportunity using adding the gradient functionality of the murrine engine. Lighting the "toolbar" buttons is another opportunity as exhibited by Nautilus.

Bluefish is a good example of the use of Notebook tabs which are also themed in Firefox.

Finally, the gold standard in my opinion is the Inkscape application which uses a wide variety of GTK widgets.

As Lucid Lynx is a Long Term Support (LTS) release the emphasis is stability and changes have been keep to a minimum.

Reference

Slideshows

Change Log

02.07.2010

Minor adjustments to GtkMenu to resolve an issue with Open Office. Open Office menu bar text was showing as black instead of white. Changed all menu check items to display muted orange instead of green. Open Office now displays dimmed menu text as desired.

02.10.2010

GTK file modified to satisfy the requirements of Murrine GTK engine version 90.3 (see human-theme bug #518325). Source packages split to permit testing in Karmic and Lucid. New screen shots will be added to wiki when time permits.

03.07.2010

Tweaks to metacity to accommodate buttons on the left side of the form.

Many enhancements are being added to the Murrine GTK engine beginning with version (90.3). Impression & Night Impression packages will be modified to support these enhancements as they are made available by the Ubuntu release process.

Feel free to download and comment as desired.

Comments

* Excellent work as always!Very nice the new version of impression, the only thing that gives me some doubt is the prelight text on menus, white text on light-gray background is not very readable in my opinion. Escanor

* This theme is great for me... I'm using it and I'm really impressed by it... The combo/buttons' shading is fantastic! And also the disabled widgets are really nice (I'd add some text rounding/shadows also in standard controls), but it has a little problem: the menu entries and the toolbars are too much tall! I'm using it at 1280x800 resolution, but they uses too much vertical space... Software like gnumeric (which has many toolbars) aren't so good as they should... And... What about also less rounded toolbars (using more "light" effects )? Thanks so much for your work!